Seventy-five years ago my great aunt and uncle were murdered in a concentration camp in Nazi Germany. The U.S. government refused them visas to enter the country despite major efforts on the part of their U.S. family.

The unspeakable images of families being torn apart on our southern border are re-traumatizing to many of us Americans whose own family stories intersect with those trying to flee persecution today.

And it's traumatizing to others who see the crisis for what it is: A humanitarian nightmare unnecessarily unleashed by a myopic White House focused on power-grabbing more than on people. Have we, as a nation, not learned anything from our sordid past?

On May 31, 1936 my grandfather and his family met in Newark, New Jersey for a monthly meeting of the “Lerner Family Circle.” Their mission was specific: They were trying to get my great grandmother Clara’s oldest brother Moris and his family out of Nazi Germany.

They had been meeting since October 27, 1935. Shockingly, the handwritten minutes of those meetings reveal that the biggest obstacle to saving our family from Hitler’s concentration camps did not come from Nazi Germany: My great uncle Morris Lerner and his wife perished in Nazi concentration camps because the U.S. government refused to issue visas for them to enter the United States.

In efforts to save my great uncle and his family from extermination camps in Germany, my U.S. family pooled their meager savings together, petitioned their congressman, sought aid from various Jewish councils in the area and looked at potential opportunities for our relatives to get to England, the West Indies or Canada.

None of these tactics succeeded.

Mail was received from the U.S. Department of State in which the answer to our request for reasons for the refusal of visas to the family were given. Mainly, they charge that the funds shown by the family were insufficient. They give a detailed account of the respective health of Moris and his wife in which they find various diseases and explain that due to the conditions of the couple, they would eventually become public charges, as the funds shown would be inadequate care for them.

At a meeting dated July 5, 1936 my great grandmother Clara, a woman born in 1884 in the “old country” with a 7th grade education, took the floor at the family circle meeting and said something that was as true in 1936 as it is today, 82 years later: That "these reasons were merely excuses and had not these defects been found in the health of the persons concerned, some other reason would be found.”

What is happening in our country today is akin to what happened to families trying to flee persecution in Europe in the 1930s. Central American families make the perilous journey across dangerous terrain for the same reasons that my family desperately tried to get out of Fascist Europe: They are being terrorized at home.

Images of infants being separated from their parents, recordings of children crying in “tent cities” are not shocking to those of us who have studied history.

Our country was founded on the same racist, xenophobic ideas that separated black children from their enslaved parents on auction blocks and that denied my Jewish ancestors access to life in the U.S.

It is time for us to learn from our past. Do not let one more child be separated from their parents for doing what so many of our families did: Leave our homes to escape terror.

Donna Rich Kaplowitz is an assistant professor in teacher education and faculty associate in the Office for Inclusion and Intercultural Initiatives at MSU.